Author: Megan

Science Friday: Arctic Animal Fat

| Megan

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I mentioned in an earlier post that we have a couple friends who are spending time at our house this summer. These two wonderful girls have so much vivaciousness and life packed into them, it is already impossible to imagine what our summer would be like without them! Dull. To say the least.

Anyway, these two cuties will be joining us for Science Fridays some weeks here on Refined + Rugged and this was our first Science Friday as a group of 4 littles + 1 mama. It was SO. MUCH. FUN!

The premise of this experiment is to question how animals stay warm in the arctic where the temperatures are freezing and ice = home. I began this experiment with one of our favorite games. We call it The Animal Game. In short, the person choosing the animals says, “I’m thinking of an animal…” And proceeds to give ONE clue about that animal to get the game started.

In this case, I was THINKING of a Polar Bear, and the kiddos guessed it almost right off the bat. The polar bear was our entrance into a discussion of other arctic animals– arctic hare, arctic fox, ermine, caribou, harp seal, beluga whale, orca, etc. Then I posed the question: How do these animals stay WARM in their frozen environment.

FUR! They all shouted simultaneously. Yes, a thick coat of fur does help some of these animals stay warm in the frigid conditions. What else might keep them warm?

FAT. The answer is fat. So we set about to see how fat keeps these animals warm in arctic home.

Happy Science Friday!

XX, Megan

1. First, I gathered the supplies above. Shortening, disposable gloves, a big bowl, ice, water, and plastic wrap (not pictured).

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2. We filled the two bowls with water and ice and gave them a good stir to make sure the water was nice and cold.

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3. Everyone got to test their little egos against the COLD water! How LONG can you keep your hand in the ice without protection?!? This one above, a smile for every challenge!

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She swore she was going to make it to 200!!! We counted to 31 and then I called it good. She would have kept going!

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Look at the determination in those eyes. She told us up front she was counting to 20 and she did!

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This little fellow would barely put his finger tips in the water. He just kept yelling about how cold it was! See his hilarious reaction below!

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Ei-eeeeeeeeE!

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“But it’s just. too. cold!” Not a fan of the cold water. I had to hide my laughter. Just a little dramatic, don’t you think?DSC_0070

Then everyone had to play in the ice water just a little more for good measure. We discussed how COLD the water was, how COLD it must be to live on an arctic ice sheet, and how COLD temperatures in the arctic can really reach– negative 50 degrees celsius!

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4. Each kiddo put on a disposable glove.

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5. Then I had them make a fist with their hand in the glove. We covered the fist in the glove in a BIG ball of shortening. Like REALLY covered the entire hand.

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6. Immediately after I put the shortening over their fist, I covered each shortening covered hand in plastic wrap. No sense in having big chunks of fat floating in your ice, right?! Don’t you just love the difference in the two poses with their fat fists! Killing me.

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7. Everyone got to stick their hand into the ice again. This time they had the protection of the glove, the fat, and the plastic wrap. “I don’t even feel the cold, Mom.” He declared.

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8. Finished! The amount of time each child could or would put their hand in the water was MUCH increased. We counted to 60 with my oldest son, and then talked about how fat is an important bodily component of arctic animals! Fat is their insulator. Fat (along with fur), keeps them warm!

Then we played in the water some more with our fat fists. Clean-up on this one was SUPER easy. Just pull off the glove from the wrist down. The entire ball of fat should just slip off into a trash bag. ALL DONE!

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*The experiment we tried this week was one I got from a preschool site, HERE. I’ve gotten several more questions about where I get my projects from. I get most of my DIY projects from Kiwi Crate. They have a fabulous Science Project section under the DIY tab on their site, and all of the projects there are FREE!

You may have also heard about Kiwi Crate on my site because we also subscribe to their Crate, and receive a box of arts, crafts, experiments, and MORE, monthly. While I’ve posted some activities we’ve done with our Kiwi Crates here on the blog, most of the Science Friday posts are DIY. I also like to pull from random places all over the internet, so for example we did a “Walking on Eggs” Science Friday last summer, and I got the info for that project from a totally different website.

We may recreate that experiment again this summer for the blog, so stay tuned. Let me know if you have an other questions, I’m happy to share experiences and advice. But for the most part, the projects we do here are straightforward, and very easy to recreate in your own home!

The other place you can go to get Science Friday ideas is HERE! Right here on Refined + Rugged. I post our experiment almost every week, and if you want to look at past projects you can simply type “science” into the Search box on my sidebar. That should pull up all of the projects I’ve posted here!

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t

| Megan

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This outfit is just about as standard as they come. Camo jacket, grey tee, jean skirt, converse. CHECK. The reality is, outfits like these are the ones that get me through the everyday. So it may be standard, but this ensemble is just right for REAL LIFE!

Plus, if you haven’t gotten on the army surplus/camo train yet, you might be pleasantly surprised with how flexible and wardrobe friendly these pieces are. Jacket, t-shirt, or pants, I’ve seen this trend worn in multiple ways and all of them add some outfit fun. I have worn this same coat over a hot pink dress to diffuse the princess and anything striped also looks great in contrast to camo. Who knew?

Hope your Thursday is rockin’.

XX, Megan

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Jacket: Old Navy (old, similar, similar, similar), T-shirt: Old Navy, Skirt: Banana Republic (similar, similar), Shoes: Converse, Sunglasses: Ray-ban 

Lentil and Beet Salad with Honey Lemon Dill Dressing

| Megan

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I am jonsing on this salad. It is fresh, it is delicious, and it was really, really, easy to make!

Wednesday is really our get-all-of-our-stuff-done day over here at casa Refined + Rugged. With summer this catching up has really turned into choring, listing, and doing a lot of run around errands each Wednesday. So when I have the opportunity to make my evening as chill and as relaxing as possible by simply preping a salad in the morning to eat that night, I’m on board.

Plus, then I don’t have to feel so bad about my toast addiction (although we also ate homemade wheat bread with this meal) or my random lunch choices. Read: eating leftover veggies from the kids’ plates and really wishing for another piece of toast! 🙂

This salad was so delicious that my husband asked if he could take the leftovers with him on an upcoming cycling race. Instead of sending leftovers, I’ll be whipping up a fresh batch of this for him for the road!

Do not let your jaw drop when you hear that I got this delicious salad from The Scramble. We recently had friends over for dinner and couldn’t stop singing the praises of this awesome meal planning service. We love this site so much, we just can’t help but share our enthusiasm!

I hope your Wednesday is as bright and cheery as leftover beet juice!

XX, Megan

Ingredients for Main Dish

2 cups cooked lentils, (or 1 cup uncooked)
4 beets, diced
1/2 cup crumbled goat or feta cheese
1/2 lemon, juice only, about 1/4 cup
1 Tbsp. honey
2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp. fresh dill, finely chopped, or use ½ tsp. dried dill

Sides

Whole wheat bread and pistachios.

If you are steaming the beets yourself (I’ve heard that Trader Joe’s actually has a vacuum package of beets, so yay for you if you can grab one of those) you’ll need to start your salad well in advance of your meal. Steam the 4 beets, green stems removed, in 1-2 inches of water, simmering with the lid on for around 45 minutes or until they are tender.

When your beets are halfway finished, boil 2 cups of water for your 1 cup of lentils. (This is only if you have quick-cooking lentils, make sure to read the packaging on yours as some of them need to be soaked overnight!) Bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer for 15-20 minutes.

Meanwhile you can mix up your dressing. Mix the oil, lemon juice (I used 1 whole lemon instead of just 1/2), honey, and dill in a large measuring cup. Whisk thoroughly. Set aside.

When your beets are finished simmering, drain under cold water and then skin them with your fingers or you can use a vegetable peeler. Let them beets cool for a few more minutes as you drain your lentils. Allow both to cool to near room temperature. Then dice the beets, and mix the beets, lentils, and feta in a medium bowl.

Top the entire salad with all of the dressing and toss gently.

ENJOY!

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1. Simmer beets and lentils.

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2. Mix the dressing. DSC_0013

3. Dice the beets.

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4. Toss the salad gently with the dressing.

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4. EAT!

*The Scramble is a meal planning service to which you can subscribe here. For a fantastic price you will receive 5 weekly meals which means 5 recipes (main course plus a side dish), complete grocery list, the ability to tweak the number of people you are making for, and full nutrition facts. PLUS tips as to how best to PREP your meal beforehand, add a punch of FLAVOR, and how to SLOW COOK almost every recipe if you’re especially slammed that night. This wonderful service really does live up to it’s name. You can come home at 6 p.m. and be sitting down to a DELICIOUS, HEALTHY, HOME COOKED meal by 6:30 p.m. most nights.

Bright White

| Megan

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I really cannot get enough of the all-white get up. I wore another all white look earlier this Spring, and it still feels so right as our green hills turn a little more yellow.

The crisp clean of all-white just speaks to me. Yes, I realize that it also speaks to super visible stains and sticky hand prints for all of you primary parents out there. Yes, I realize for SO MANY reasons it seems completely impractical, but I’ll continue to lean on clorox as my excuse to wear this sort of mix.

This week has already been so full, I cannot believe it is only Tuesday. I am looking forward to the rest of our goings and doings and hoping you are each having and experiencing a wonderful existence in this time sequence!

XX, Megan DSC_0080 DSC_0089

Sweater: Ann Taylor, Jeans: J.Crew, Shoes: Vans (and here), Sunglasses: Karen Walker ‘Super Duper’, Watch: Rolex Submariner (gift), Lips: Mac Candy Yum-Yum

A Wrinkle In Time

| Megan

Let’s try this again, shall we?

I have been trying to get this post in order for nearly two weeks, and I’m pretty sure it ghost posted it last Tuesday when I forgot to send it back to the drafting board for major revisions! (Read: I was still trying to finish re-reading the book!) So here is my RE-vised post about my RE-read of this wonderful book: A Wrinkle In Time.

Do you have a favorite book you read as a child or a young adult? Do you have a book that you still remember vividly even though it has been many, many, (maybe I should put three many’s here because I am in my thirties?) many years since you have read it? Do you have a book(s) that has changed you somehow? Maybe all literature changes us. I haven’t thought on that enough, or formulated a lengthy treatise on the subject.

Maybe LITERATURE is LITERATURE because it’s intent is to CHANGE US– to make us better people in the reading– the purpose of all FINE ART, yes? For purposes of this post it would sound grandiose to say, “The book that changed me most was A WRINKLE IN TIME, by Madeline L’Engle.”

But that statement wouldn’t be totally accurate. In fact, the moment I purposed that statement to myself in my head to write here on the page I began listing other books that changed me, that have sunk in deep. I’ve shared some of them here already– Desert Solitaire, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian are a few I’ve shared here on my blog.

But some other young adult titles come to mind like The Giver, and Maniac Magee, and To Kill A Mocking Bird, and The Devil’s Arithmetic, and Night by Eli Wiesel, and The Book Thief, to name a few.

The ephemera that has stayed with me surrounding A Wrinkle In Time is that it is one of the first books where I not only fell in love with the BOOK itself, I fell in love with the AUTHOR. After finishing A Wrinkle In Time, I remember heading to my elementary school library in search of other titles by Madeline L’Engle. That desire to read everything that someone has written is still a great way to find great books.

I also remember A Wrinkle In Time because it was my soft introduction to sic-fi/fantasy. A genre that I don’t really read much now as an adult, but I remember how much I loved L’Engle’s mix of space, time, science, and off-planet experiences. Now listen, you don’t have to be a geek to enjoy L’Engle’s works.

In fact, they are perfect easy adult reads for lazy summer evenings, and I dare you to read (or re-read) A Wrinkle In Time and NOT seek out the other titles in this series– A Wind In The Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. The premise of A Wrinkle In Time is Meg Murray and her younger brother Charles Wallace’s search for their missing father. A renowned physicist who has gone missing in a top-secret government mission to… the children can only guess.

I cannot get enough of L’Engle’s word use, character descriptions, or dialogue. I revel in her easy use of beautiful verbiage, too. Maybe that sounds like a standard description of what a writer is hoping to do in a text, use beautiful language.

But I’ve recently read some books where the dialogue seemed forced, the word choice sup-par, and the plot over-burdened with drama and continuous details that felt as though the author wasn’t simply trying to navigate you through their story, but bludgeon you with crazy circumstances to keep you reading, i.e ala evening news style. (The House We Grew Up In, I don’t recommend the read.)

Last of all, I love L’Engle for her heart. Yes, ever the sap. I love that Madeline L’Engle loves. She loves to write. She loves her characters, and love is her driving motivation in her work. You can hear it and feel it, and it will fill you up through this book!

XX, Megan 11270336_10102021832263846_660076108398222106_o